My
little tutorial covers the texturing
process of my backyard scene.
Of course I will not deal with everything
- no one would read the whole story
:)
Most of the textures were taken from
the 3D TotalTexture CDs. The plants
are my own textures though that would
be a good idea for a new 3D Total
Texture CD ;)
Let's
start with the barrel full of water:
I applyed a color-map and the corresponding
bump-map for the metal and wood.
As the barrel is supposed to look very
old, I added moss and alga with a simple
procedural texture and one of the dirt-masks
for blending (in Lightwave the dirt-mask
has to be above the moss-layer with
the belnding mode set to "alpha").
Continuing
with the downspout...
To
assign a texture map to the pipe
I modelled a simple tube and created
a sperical UV-map.
After that I bended the lower part.
That's much easyer than assigning
a UV-map to a bent pipe. So sometimes
it's quite comfortable to assign
UV-maps before the model is done.
The outer surface is a rusty metal
texture with bump and specular map
while the inner material is a bark-texture.
Of course there's no wood inside
of the pipe but that texture could
also be used for this kind of dirt.
In reality the dirt doesn't stop
at the end of the spout. Therefore
some dirt hanging down the from
it is necessary.
Many people would not think of it
but those details are vital for
natural scenes.
To clip the dirt I used the same
dirt-mask I already used on the
moss. There are many dirt-masks
on the Total Texture CDs but I wanted
to show a handy little feature in
Lightwave.
It is possible to clone images and
edit each individual clone in Lightwave.
You can create many varieties of
one texture and save much memory.
If one texture in many different
colors is needed just clone and
edit it or assign various shaders.
Here I increased the contrast of
the map to achieve a sharper clipping
without affecting the texture file.
As
for the
walls...
A simple mesh with many textures:
The base texture is a brick map. The
bump maps on the TotalTexture CDs
are not just grayscale versions of
the the color-maps. A color map in
the bump-channel often looks wrong!
Again it's the same mix of color-,
bump- and alpha-maps like before.
This time I did not only use the dirt-masks
for clipping but also in the bump-channel
(figures 3 and 4) because the plaster
has a certain strengh you can see
at the border of the holes.
Finally one moss-layer running up
the wall restricted by another dirt-mask.
Now,
the
plants...
You won't find plants on the TotalTexture
CDs but it's an important part of
the scene.
I searched the web and found many
nice images of grass and plants. In
winter (I'm writing this in december)
it's hard to take photos of green
plants, you see. ;)
That was the simple part.
Unfortunately they had no alpha maps
so that was my job.
About
shadow
maps...
With shadow maps you can fake shadows
without the object that would cast
them.
In lightwave you can assign projection
images to spot lights. In other packagit
will work as well, of course.
It's easy to use but there is one
disadvantage:
You may see pixels if the camera gets
to close to an object where the shadow
is cast on.
A blur filter solves the problem because
it's independent of the texture resolution.
That's
it. Simple, isn't it?
Well, it would not have been that
easy without these great textures.
I can really recommend the TotalTexture
CDs without a doubt. Great quality
for a reasonable price.
Buy Buy Buy !!!
This image was created using
a few of the hundreds of textures from the
Total Texture CDs - very comprehensive texture
collections priced with the hobbyist in mind.
To see more examples, download free
samples and read full details follow
this link
